Re: Dock app using distributed objects

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

> On 7 Dec 2021, at 08:48, Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Riccardo,
> 
> Firstly, the dock is visually appealing, full marks. :)
> 
> 
> On Mon, Dec 6, 2021 at 3:03 PM Riccardo Canalicchio 
> <riccardo.canalicchio@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> I have been thinking about how to have a live image representation of an app 
> for a dock application and I wanted to try with distributed objects.
> 
> But, secondly, I believe there is another, more lightweight, way that can be 
> used to do this aside from DO.  The issue I see here is requiring every app 
> to do it this way.  If you look in NSApplication you will see a reference to 
> NSIconView and NSIconWindow.  These classes display the changing icon in 
> WindowMaker (this is not an endorsement of wmaker, I would like a GS based 
> Dock outside of GWorkspace as well).  So, perhaps, it is possible to do this 
> without using Distributed Objects.   This is only a suggestion, I like where 
> you're going.

Yes ... I remmber from many, many years ago (way back when I was working on the 
GUI) I had this working as it worked in NeXTstep:  the miniwindow used to be a 
fully functional window that a NeXTstep app could write into while it is in the 
dock.  This was used to create visual indicators, in the dock, of the state of 
an application.

I also recall being annoyed because Apple removed this functionality from OSX 
and replaced it with a different mechanism (much more limited and less 
technically satisfying, but a simpler way to achieve a similar effect in 
practice), though I don't recall the details.  I'm pretty sure we moved to 
match the OSX implementation.  I expect this is what WindowMaker is working 
with.